Web site helps youth kick the habit

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The finishing touches are being put on a new Website for Aboriginal youth designed to help them better understand why they smoke, and give them the help they need to quit.

The "A Tribe Called Quit" Website is being launched by the Aboriginal Youth Network (AYN). The site was developed at the request of Health Canada, which funded the project as an alternative to their Quit for Life program, so that it would better target youth, especially Aboriginal youth.

To accomplish the task, AYN, which operates out of the offices of the Nechi Training, Research and Health Promotions Institute in Edmonton, started with a manual developed previously by the institute - "Tobacco: Addiction & Recovery, A Spiritual Journey."

"It's the first manual of its kind because it's completely culturally appropriate. It's one of the very few manuals that talks about the reasons why people start smoking," explained AYN communications officer Carmen Daniels. "It actually talks about things like the grieving model. It talks about 'I smoke because my family does,' 'I smoke because my friends do,' and that sort of thing."

Another unique feature of the Nechi publication, Daniels said, was inclusion of a medicine bag, with tools to help people stop smoking, and to help them during any relapses. That feature, too, was adapted as part of the AYN project.

"What we did was we decided we'd adapt this manual to sort of kids-speak. We wanted it to be presented in a way that Aboriginal youth would actually want to read it," Daniels said.

"If you've ever taken a look at the Quit for Life Web site that is on the Health Canada Web site, it's very surface-issue, and it talks a lot about things like 'Matthew smokes, and Matthew plays video games, but suddenly Matthew doesn't have enough money for video games. Well, I guess he'd better stop smoking.' And it didn't really do anything as far as effectiveness. Yes, Quit for Life had quizzes on their Web site, and they had scary tobacco facts. But nothing really hit home about targeting the reasons why Matthew or all the other characters on the site started smoking in the first place. So that was one of the things that set the manual apart."

The job of adapting the Nechi manual "to real-life situations that kids could actually relate to" fell to 18-year-old Metis youth James Benson.

"What he did was he actually took those stories -'I smoke because my friends do,' 'I smoke because my family does,' 'I smoke because I grieve,' and 'I don't smoke.' That was an interesting twist, was we actually included a story of somebody who never smoked in the first place. So we took all of those reasons, those clinical studies of the reasons why people smoke, like the grieving model, and he actually made characters out of them. He made characters based on statistical studies of Aboriginal youth smokers and non-smokers in Canada."

Benson created four characters -Karen, Marilyn, Clayton and Mitch.

Karen's story is featured prominently on the site, told in an interactive comic book.

"She's a 12-year-old First Nations youth from Bear reserve in Nova Scotia. And she takes us through the grieving model," Daniels explained. "And what's interesting about it is that, as you go progressively through Karen's story, you're taken through each step of the grieving model, but you don't even know it, which is probably the coolest thing about it, is it tells the story in such a way that people are going through all the reasons why she started smoking in the first place . . . she doesn't really like doing it. She's only 12, she's having a problem buying cigarettes, but in the end, you're going through bargaining, anger and acceptance. And the story actually centres around the breakup of her parents, which is the whole basis of the grieving model."

The other three characters are featured in the manual itself- Marilyn, a 15-year-old Inuit youth living in the north who smokes because her family does. Clayton, a 13-year-old Aboriginal youthliving in Vancouver who smokes because his friends do; and Mitch, a 17-year-old Metis youth living in Saddle Lake, Alta. who has never smoked even though all his friends and family smoke.

"So it takes you through a kind of a big long character study of all the reasons why people do and don't smoke," Daniels said.

"Karen's story is the interactive comic book, and it's the most, I think, hard-hitting story. I mean, you can't tell a kid, 'Did you know you smoke because you grieve? First you're going to go through anger . . . . ' It's just not effective, you know," she said.

"With Karen's story, the story talks a lot about the cultural uses of tobacco. And that's one of the things that all the kids sort of learned about along the way in each of the stories, each of the characters in the manual, is they all learned about the cultural uses of tobacco. Some already knew it in the story, some of them didn't. But they all sort of got an appreciation for why Aboriginal people use tobacco in the first place and what are the uses and why did Aboriginal people find it sacred. So it's a really different sort of project, and it's the only project right now going on in Canada that approaches tobacco reduction and resiliency from a completely cultural approach," Daniels said.

"I think the most important thing was to make sure all the time that kids actually were going to read this, that they'd actually find it interesting. And that we weren't being too preachy. And that's where the whole adaptation of the manual came in.

"We actually did focus groups with kids between the ages of 10 to 16. And we were really surprised with what happened. We did one focus group over at Ben Calf Robe school [in Alberta] and most of the kids were smokers. Some weren't . . . some were like 10-year-old smokers, some were 16 years old and didn't smoke. So it was a really diverse group. When we read the stories to the kids, they identified with all the stories in one aspect or another, all for differnt reasons," Daniels said.

In addition to showing them where they were succeeding, the focus groups also helped show the project developers where they missed the mark.

"We were really surprised because Clayton's story, which is the one 'I smoke because my friends do,' they laughed at us. They pretty much said, 'You have to change that, because kids don't smoke because their friends do. It was a really big eye opener. We had no idea. And it was because of the way we had presented our material, and it was then that we had to go back and we had to look at the story again and say, 'OK, are we being too blatant? Are we saying, "Don't you know you smoke because your friends do? We at age 25 see it. How come you don't see it? And that's the specific reason. It totally went over our heads. So we had to go back and we had to rework the story with the kids' comments and bring in what they thought of it. How they perceived people who smoke."

In addition to the tobacco manual, the interactive comic book and the medicine bag, the project also includes the actual online portion, with tobacco facts, interactive quizzes, and statistical studies.

"If you need sort of hard researched information, and sort of a 'did you know' thing about tobacco, you can find that there," Daniels said.

The site also includes streaming video from Tobacco: Sacred Smoke, Addictive Weed, produced by Native Counselling Services of Alberta's Bearpaw Media Productions.

Although the Web site itself will make the information available and attractive to Aboriginal youth, the site has also been developed to be used as a teaching tool in communities.

"Part of the reason why we wanted to provide the manual and the medicine bag in pdf format was so that health resource people or teachers or counsellors, anybody in community development, can download this resource for free and use it in their own settings, whether it be in the friendship centre or in the health centre," Daniels said.

The "A Tribe Called Qui Web site can be found at http://www.ayn.ca/quit.

For more information about "A Tribe Called Quit," write to siteadmin@ayn.ca or call 1-800-459-1884 and ask for Anita Large, AYN's new senior communications officer and Web site administrator.